Yoshie or Doug, others? Re: Gitlin on the student peace movement

David Jennings djenning at arches.uga.edu
Fri Sep 21 16:53:13 PDT 2001


On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, Stephen E Philion wrote:


> On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, kelley wrote:
>
<snip/>


> <>
> > i don't get your question about the media. who gives a bat's eyelash. the
> > national media does what it wants; the only thing you can do is work with
> > your locals. meet with the editor, become human to them: intelligent,
> > reasonable, cognizant of the issues, sensitive to the impact of the event.
> > get decent, local coverage as much as possible.
>
> Well, it matters if they are misreporting a movement as being evenly
> comprised of 'left and right' when the left is largely responsible for the
> movement and has no stock in the racism or isolationism of a Pat Buchanan.
> One of the ways the media tries to discredit a movement is by providinng
> the role of 'leader' to people whose 'leadership' in a movement consist
> primarily of putting out a press release.

That's eerily familiary. This is from FAIR regarding Seattle:

--------------------- Perhaps the single WTO opponent who received the largest amount of time on CNN to expound his views was Pat Buchanan, who was interviewed, one-on-one and at length, by Inside Politics anchor Judy Woodruff (11/30/99). Though right-wing nationalists did not appear to be an appreciable fraction of the actual protesters in Seattle's streets, the media seemed to anoint Buchanan as a major leader of the anti-WTO movement. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote (12/1/99) that "knaves like Pat Buchanan" had "duped" the demonstrators--"a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix"--into protesting the WTO.

[ http://www.fair.org/extra/0001/wto-prattle.html ] ---------------------

Now I guess it's going to be apologists for terror, Israel haters, and misty-eyed peaceniks duped into bad talking vengeance as a foreign policy principle.

- David



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